Cooler Master Oracle Air NVMe M.2 SSD Enclosure Review

1. Introduction2. CoolerMaster Oracle Air NVMe M.2 SSD Enclosure3. ATTO/CrystalDiskMark/AS SSD4. Throughput 5. PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark6. Temperature7. Real Life File Transfers8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

The Oracle Air is the first model in a new portfolio of products from Cooler Master. Eventually, the Oracle series will feature different variants of enclosures, each with a different feature set. The Air model has been designed to target content creators and other professionals rather than gamers, which means with this version there's no fancy RGB lighting to distract you.

The Oracle Air is a two-part tool-free design, both parts constructed from aluminium. The inner core of the enclosure is a two-part shell, one part holds the small PCB which holds the M.2 socket and the JMircon JMS583 bridge chip. This section also holds the mounts for the mounting pin for holding the drive in place. The inner core has a lock that clicks into place to keep it from slipping out of the outer shell. This lock also doubles as a support for the MOLLE system.  The outer casing of the enclosure is covered in ventilation holes of various shapes and sizes to help get rid of the heat generated by the drive.

Installing a drive into the Oracle Air is a doddle. The first part is a little fiddly the first couple of times around. The enclosure comes with a little rubberised pin, that takes the place of the standard M.2 fixing screw. The pin is slotted to take the back of the drive and once the drive is pushed into the M.2 slot the pin is pushed into the appropriate housing on one side of the inner core. The Oracle Air supports M.2 2230, 2242, 2260, and 2280 formats.

As to the Oracle Air's performance, it obviously depends on the SSD you stick in it as it's an empty enclosure. For our testing purposes, we used the 1TB WD Blue SN570 Gen3 drive that Cooler Master bundled with the review sample. As the enclosure also supports Gen4 drives we also did some testing with a Samsung SSD980 PRO to see how cool the Oracle Air could keep it.

The best Sequential read performance we saw came while testing the WD drive came with the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark with the default (0fill), Peak Performance (0 fill) and Peak Performance default test all producing a figure of 1,083MB/s. The fastest write figure of 1,083MB/s also came from the default (0 fill) test.

Using the Samsung drive we saw the ATTO and AS SSD results rise and while the Sequential read figures obtained from the CrystalDiskMark stayed the same the fastest write speed rose slightly to 1,092MB/s.

We found the basic Oracle Air on Overclockers UK for £59.99 (inc VAT) HERE

If you want to use the same package as we reviewed, the Oracle Air with a 1TB WD Blue SN570, this is also available from Overclockers for £99.95 (inc VAT) HERE 

Pros

• Tool-free design.
• Ease of drive installation.
• Build quality.

Cons

• The drive-fixing pin can be a bit fiddly at times.

Kitguru says: Cooler Master's first foray into the NVMe SSD enclosure market is a pretty good one. The Oracle Air is a well-designed, pocket-sized and tool-free external drive that bodes well for what's to come in the future from the company.

Become a Patron!